This disclosure relates generally to management decision-making support and, more particularly, to a method and system for cross-domain enterprise collaborative decision support.
Current trends in the manufacturing environment increase the weight of collaboration in the manufacturing process. While developing information and processes has always been important in the manufacturing process, with recent emphasis on the convergence of IT and the manufacturing process, leading organizations have begun taking collaboration to the next level.
An example of these trends is the Enterprise Bill of Process (eBOP). With increasingly capable IT infrastructures, the Bill of Process (BOP), is becoming a global consideration in Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). The resulting eBOP, a best practices template for production, is creating a place for cross-functional teams to share information and collaborate in ways that weren't possible before.
The resulting shift toward process-centric management of workflows across the enterprise using eBOP is similar to taking a Business Process Management (BPM) approach on the shop floor.
At least some known manufacturing processes begin with a product idea that is first visualized with an engineering design, followed by the creation of a Bill of Materials (BOM). The BOM is a list of parts and materials needed to make a product, and, without it, manufacturing would be impossible. But the BOM is only part of the product equation. It shows “what” to make, not “how” to manufacture it, leaving the rest up to the BOP.
During the design process, engineers create a design-oriented parts list, i.e., eBOM, which represents how engineering views the product. Manufacturing engineers restructure the eBOM into a process-oriented mBOM (commonly known as a Bill of Process—BOP). It will show how the product will be made, and simultaneously create the sequence of steps to produce a part and the required resources—work centers, tools and skills.
The BOP includes detailed plans explaining the manufacturing processes for a particular product. Within these plans resides in-depth information on machinery, plant resources, equipment layout, configurations, tools, and instructions. Traditionally, companies with many plants and processes have only informal BOPs for each location, or for each product or manufacturing line at a location. Changes to the BOP are communicated to the rest of the enterprise during periodic meetings of the interested parties and it is typical for the process to take a long time and a lot of man/hours. There is a lack of efficiency, scalability, and visibility in this methodology.
There have been many attempts to bring data and activities from PLM and MOM together within the so-called “Digital Manufacturing” discipline. An example is a concept to combine the eBOP and BPM (Business Process Management) to act as an integration platform between Engineering and Manufacturing Operations. There are also many collaboration platforms, but these are very generic social platforms and do not provide process management capabilities.
Global Manufacturing enterprises have invested heavily in operational excellence practices for many years, wringing the inefficiencies out of every operation in the production process. Supply chains have been tightened, inventories reduced or virtually eliminated with just-in-time processing, and production operations at every stage streamlined and optimized.
But there is one area in the lean revolution that often is not considered—not because it doesn't matter, but because it has been so difficult to deliver a solution. That neglected area is the management decision-making process. For example, consider a global manufacturer that has practiced continuous improvement for a period of time. During that time, products roll off the assembly line with precision. The quality team is successfully managing a quality of production worldwide, so yields are consistently high. Warehouses operate at top efficiency. And then, a supplier problem develops such as, a key component begins trending out of specification. The response of the global manufacturer to this problem depends on the managers who have responsibility, how quickly can they identify the problem, whether corrective action procedures are in place, how quickly they correct the problem, and how accurately.
A main challenge is how to get the optimal inter-cooperation out of the key enterprise process domains and let the results drive the relevant business decision processes within a social collaborative environment:
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)—as the highest financial and commercial system domain.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)—or the Global Engineering system domain.
Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) or Global Production Management system domain.
There are already many attempts to bring these domains to cooperate together, but the focus is mainly on how to make these extremely isolated systems (ERP, PLM, MOM) exchange their data efficiently. In general, these efforts focused mainly on the system interface or interconnection, with some use-cases or business scenarios demonstrating the benefits of those data sharing or exchange. There are many attempts to bring data and activities from PLM and MOM together within the so-called “Digital Manufacturing” discipline.
There are several concepts to make the combined eBOP (Enterprise Bill-Of-Process) and MOM (Manufacturing Operations Management) acting as platform for data interchange between both domains—but these efforts don't involve Business Process Management. There are also generic collaboration frameworks in the market—like Yammer, Jive etc. But, these are only generic frameworks and there is no workflow or procedure involved for the collaborative decision-making. There is no concept or real-world practice that addresses the holistic interoperability for key decision-makers in the global enterprise and covering all enterprise domains with global governance from the BPM point of view. Known attempts provide only narrow-scope interconnections between ERP, PLM, and MOM systems and mainly focus on data exchange.